The California Native Landscape: The Homeowner’s Design Guide to Restoring Its Beauty and Balance by Greg Rubin and Lucy Warren is just as the title explains. It is a thorough guide about different ways to cultivate any landscape one might have. I borrowed the book primarily for its visuals of landscapes, plants, and, of course, native information about flora, which was perfect for my purposes. The book is very good for taking notes on specific landscapes one might hope to capture, either through your own cultivation or, in my case, through art studies.

Rubin and Warren stress the necessity of combining different native flora and the ways they grow naturally in order to encourage growth, animal encounters, and even properties that help keep fires at bay. In the book, they prioritize native plants that are especially drought-resistant, and they include hundreds of different flora with detailed descriptions. I was able to take really good notes on the flora besides my journal entries and landscape sketches, which is super helpful with defining form and the biological reasoning behind it. As the title implies, The California Native Landscape is a really good guide to landscaping because of how it organizes shrubs, ground covers, and understory plants, and it is well-edited for their different uses and needs. The book even adds geographical and historical information about the landscapes during the vast pre-colonial periods, aiding the reader in learning about the floral context of the land that they are researching.

It was certainly a great read, and while I didn’t journal every bit of gorgeous imagery in the book, it was incredibly useful in giving me a better sense of the different types of landscapes that exist and how different plants flow into each other, specifically helping me understand the form of cultivated nature. I would definitely recommend this book to anyone who wants to learn more about California landscapes and gain insights into native plants and their potential uses.

Review by: Devin Castillo

Devin is a senior at Camino Nuevo Dalzell Lance High School.

—Evette Allahverdian, Young Adult Librarian, Cahuenga Branch Library